37 Foreign Policy Experts Throw In with Populist Coalition to Pull Back from Yemen and Rein In the ‘War Party’

37 leading foreign policy academics, public intellectuals, and activists from across the traditional political spectrum delivered an open letter to senators Thursday, urging support for a resolution to rein in U.S. involvement in Yemen’s civil war.

“Since March 2015, U.S. Armed Forces have been engaged in hostilities alongside the Saudi- and United Arab Emirates-led coalition of regional militaries fighting the Houthi rebels of Yemen,” the letter explains, citing reports of American targeting assistance, aerial refueling operations, and live U.S. intelligence feeds without which “the Saudi coalition’s ‘daily bombing campaign would not be possible.'”

The ideological antipodes of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Chris Murphy (D-CT) joined to introduce a Senate resolution (S.J.Res.54) invoking the War Powers Act and the U.S. Constitution to demand the administration seek congressional authorization or withdraw from Yemen within 30 days.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) threw his support “in principle” behind the proposal, which may represent the most serious effort to restrain executive power to unilaterally wage war since the post-Vietnam War debates that led to the War Powers Act’s passage in 1973. On Thursday, this group of 37 experts wholeheartedly endorsed the Sander-Lee-Murphy plan to reassert Congress’s sole constitutional authority to declare war and argues for withdrawing the unauthorized American involvement in the war.

The group is a who’s who of the opponents of neoconservatism and liberal-internationalist intervention, many of them stalwarts of the anti-war far-left like Professor Noam Chomsky. But also included are voices broadly of the right like former Republican congressman and one-time American Conservative Union Chairman Mickey Edwards, Reagan administration DOJ number two Bruce Fein, and American Conservative editor Daniel Larison, as well as those more difficult to define like left-libertarian law professor Lawrence Lessig, (initially) Iraq War-supporting liberal Peter Beinart, and the University of Chicago’s Dr. John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent foreign policy realist in academia. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners and two activist widows of the 9/11 attacks also signed on.

The signatories cite President Donald Trump’s own demand for the Saudis to stop their blockade of Yemen and makes a humanitarian case for withdrawal. “Any public debate to declare war or authorize U.S. force against Yemen’s Houthis should account for the fact that the Saudi-led conflict has put a staggering 8.4 million Yemenis ‘a step away from famine,’ according to the United Nations,” it reads.

The letter represents the latest addition to a growing, ideologically-transcendent coalition that increasingly sees unilateral military action on the part of the presidency as illegal and undesirable and is willing to combat what conservative leader Pat Buchanan has for years called Washington’s “War Party.” In November, this coalition secured a more mild resolution against unauthorized U.S. involvement in Yemen in the House of Representatives through the joint efforts of, for example, arch-liberal Ro Khanna (D-CA) and solid-red Walter Jones (R-NC).

So far in the Senate, liberal senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Edward Markey (D-MA) have signed on to the Sanders-Lee-Murphy resolution. Beyond Lee and Paul, Republican support has been slow in materializing, but a broad effort is underway to change that.

Below is a full list of the signatories of the letter in support of the Sanders-Lee-Murphy resolution:

Bruce Ackerman
Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University

Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, USA (ret.)

Jody Williams
Nobel Peace Laureate (USA, 1997)

Amb. (ret.) Stephen Seche
United States Ambassador to Yemen (2007-2010)

Philippe Nassif
Executive Director, In Defense of Christians in the Middle East

John J. Mearsheimer
R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.)
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary,
Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell